Living Marxism and the Serbs

Your coverage of the libel case brought by ITN against LM (Poison in the well of history, March 15) gives no indication of the real losers from the bizarre twists and turns of LM's politics: its own supporters.

Ten years ago, when I first joined the party, LM was a vibrant intellectual and polemical magazine which could draw on a national network of hundreds of supporters. In recent times, people like myself have had to stand back and watch as the organisation, its discussions and activities, have been closed down and party leaders have switched from calling themselves die-hard communists to espousing the virtues of the free market.

While Mick Hume, Claire Fox and others at the top were building up a coterie of followers in the academic and media world, we were being told: "Our aim is social revolution." Yet within a short time the party was declared finished and anyone who expressed any vaguely leftwing sympathies were ridiculed as being old-fashioned "liberals", "Trotskyists" and sometimes even both.

As for the ITN libel case, I imagine that the judgment probably was unfair, but it is difficult to suppress a certain feeling of grim satisfaction at the imminent demise of Mr Hume's cynical magazine. Robert LeaderNottingham

 Ed Vulliamy makes a number of statements and insinuations about me. Two are correct; the rest are false. Mea culpa, I am, as alleged, both a Serb and an employee of the Economist Intelligence Unit. Alas, though, I have never been associated with LM, Living Marxism, or any Serbian or Yugoslav government agency, I have never authored any attacks, "virulent" or otherwise, on "bloody liberals". Vulliamy also falsely attributes to me a rant about non-Serbs, bizarrely in the form of internal company email from 1995 that "came his way". You really should consider using reliable sources and more capable computer hackers. Laza KekicEconomist Intelligence Unit

 Mick Hume, LM's editor, has portrayed himself as a brave advocate of conviction politics against the might of the organisations and states. Nothing could be further from the case. Far closer is the picture Ed Vulliamy describes of the victory of ITN over Living Marxism as that of truth over politics and dilettantism.

I gave a talk at Leeds University in the early months of the Bosnian war, and the Revolutionary Communist Party turned up there too. They distributed gory photographs of atrocities committed by "Croats and Muslims" and disputed any strategy or pattern of the Serbian actions other than a natural defence against "fascism". (Their evidence, not that it made any difference to them, was some 50 years old, from the second world war.)

Their aim was to stifle debate on the issue, to bury the criticism of what they saw as a "near-socialist" regime, in a cynically calculated bombardment of misinformation and propaganda. For them, "truth" was a bourgeois notion, political power was the higher cause. Such was clearly the strategy behind the LM article.

It is lucky for the political sheep who follow not just the tawdry politics of LM, but also the tawdry politics of the Times and the foreign office, that there are indeed some journalists, if rather fewer academics, prepared to put their reputations on the line over such issues. Martin CohenEditor, the Philosopher

 Ed Vulliamy has clearly never learned that it is the winners who write history, and a victory for history is not necessarily a victory for justice. How does he expect a magazine with a maximum circulation of 12,000 to find and fly over witnesses when they can clearly hardly afford a decent lawyer? Michael CainesKing's College, London michael_caines@hotmail.com

 I wonder whether Ed Vulliamy's Serbophobia has not affected his sanity, just as anti-semitism does to others. He argues that it is a "mutated strand of anti-semitism" to criticise the Muslim takeover in Bosnia or Kosovo and that the "Muslims were the Jews of Bosnia". I cannot think of any less apt comparison. Muslims account for a fifth of the world population and they have dozens of independent states. The Jews of Europe, by contrast, were a small minority everywhere, and had no independent political power or aspirations.

Vulliamy calls the Serbs "tinpot Nazis of the Balkans". However, it was not the Serbs who initiated the break-up of Yugoslavia, but the Germans (who dominated the EU) and the Croats. Serbs in Bosnia and the newly created state of Croatia had no alternative but to make their dispositions. They did many of the wrong things because they lacked a political leadership after decades of dictatorship other than the detritus of the Communist party. They are now the main victims, with a million refugees and tens of thousands of dead. Alfred ShermanLondon

 Not content with winning its libel action, ITN is threatening to enforce its judgment against LM magazine and its editor. Presumably ITN believes in a free press. If so, why make that freedom conditional on payment of £375,000 damages and costs? Jon HolbrookLondon Jon.Holbrook@ukbar.com